Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World

before the count’s donation in 1669—it would be unfair to single Rudbeck out as the culprit in the crime, that is, without clear evidence linking him to the alteration. Surely Rudbeck the master technician would have made the changes in a more dexterous and artful manner than the way they appear. The possibility of another actor should at least be entertained.

For scholars who have investigated this controversy, the name most often mentioned is again Rudbeck’s energetic brother-in-law, Carl Lundius. Sometimes it seems that Professor Lundius is still, three centuries later, deflecting blame for the unscrupulous forgeries away from Rudbeck or some other close friend.

Lundius had an undeniably strong desire to push forward the frontiers of the search for Atlantis. He would certainly have had the knowledge of variant readings of Ubizvai, as well as the necessary access to the Silver Bible. More suspiciously, his own work on the laws of ancient Sweden unquestionably relies on sources that no known scholar had used before or has since.

In his Zamolxis, for instance, a work discussing the legendary first Gothic lawgiver mentioned briefly by Herodotus, Lundius cited some curious documents that would supposedly place Zamolxis’s home in Sweden. His name in “our scrolls” was Samolses, and Lundius applauded Herodotus for his accuracy, “the perfect agreement and harmony [with] the incunabula of the ancient Goths.” But grander and more dramatic claims would follow from his controversial waxed tablets. For example: “We have in evidence a number of literary monuments having a completely overwhelming convincing force, attesting to the Greeks having taken from the Goth (Geta), in every particular, the essential element of the Athenian legislation.” Unfortunately, no one has ever seen any of these manuscripts.

Maybe all these documents preserving the ancient Swedish-Greek cultural links were destroyed in one of the fires that ravaged Uppsala over the years, or were somehow lost over time. Even if we assume the best of intentions, however, and make the most cautious conclusions, Lundius’s scrolls remain very much in doubt.

Nevertheless there is still good reason not to rush into accusing this zealous law professor. It is certainly possible that Lundius was not so much the deceiver as the deceived. The scrapings and repaintings in the Gothic Bible are in fact only the most prominent of a series of questionable and nefarious activities on the fringes of Rudbeck’s search for Atlantis. Some have pointed to an entire “forgery factory” in operation somewhere in the gabled university town.

Could the culprit be a certain one of Professor Lundius’s friends and colleagues, now known to have been a forger, manipulating old manuscripts with a deliberate attempt to deceive? After all, this friend was arguably the most talented and prolific of all known forgers in Scandinavian history: a priest named Nils Rabenius.

What little is certain about Rabenius’s life gives the impression of a checkered career. Suspended from his duties, criticized for flagrant disobedience, and reprimanded for routine drunkenness, this renegade priest even spent a night or two in jail. Unscrupulous and highly unstable, Rabenius seems to have reveled in mischief, with his antics earning him a degree of notoriety and, oddly enough, also a position as court preacher in Stockholm for the very devout king Charles XI.

Rabenius was an avid collector of medieval manuscripts, and a notorious editor of the documents he accumulated. He was particularly prone to inserting exploits of his own family. Any mention of someone in the “Rabbe” family in a medieval document is today considered a good reason to question its authenticity. So one can only wonder about Rabenius the champion forger, his well-known connections with Lundius, and the parchments circulating around Uppsala supposedly chronicling Zeus’s adventures in Sweden.

As far as the forgeries in the Gothic Bible are concerned, another intriguing option put forth by the Swedish scholar Gunnar Eriksson changes the terms of the debate somewhat. As the discovery of the tampering is not known to have been made until the 1730s, years after the death of Rudbeck and the other principal characters in this story, it is possible that the changes in the Silver Bible were made after the Atlantica was printed. This may sound paradoxical, but as Eriksson correctly points out, when Rudbeck linked Ubizvai to Uppsala, he was not relying on the Silver Bible. He was using instead a manuscript in De la Gardie’s collection, now lost. In other words, it could have been Lundius, Rabenius, or a later reader who had access to the work at the university library—and then decided to “correct” the Silver Bible to make it agree with Rudbeck’s Atlantica.

At any rate, regardless of who actually made the changes, the forged manuscripts and the fabricated passages in the Gothic Bible illustrate the great difficulty Rudbeck and his supporters were starting to face in the search for Atlantis. They also show just how far some would go to find the necessary yet elusive evidence, even if it meant unscrupulously tampering with the material. Expectations for Rudbeck’s quest were high, and already rising. Each new finding only increased the plausibility of the sweeping vision, while at the same time intensifying the demand for greater, more exciting breakthroughs.

BY THE END of 1678, Sweden had emerged as the original home of the classical gods, and the land often visited by ancient heroes in search of wisdom and enlightenment. One of the last discoveries that Rudbeck managed to fit into his bulging volume of Atlantica was no less impressive.

His theory involved the runes, best known today perhaps as a language of elves, dwarves, and hobbits in the fantasy realm of Middle Earth. But as J. R. R. Tolkien, Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, knew, the runes were once a functioning alphabetic script found in Scandinavia and northern Europe. The sharp, angular symbols could be scratched into wooden staffs, cut into helmets, inscribed on whalebone, or, more often, carved on large standing stones, usually adorned with intertwining snakes or dragons. Just over three thousand inscriptions are known today in Sweden, by far the most in any country. A full thousand are found in the area around Uppsala alone, most of which had already been discovered by the late seventeenth century.

Interpreting these runes is a thrilling and at times very difficult challenge. Scholars have not been able to agree about many things, including for instance where the letters originated. Strong arguments have been put forward in favor of Sweden, Denmark, the Black Sea region, and somewhere high atop the Alps. Not even the basic chronology can be convincingly determined. The most commonly proposed time of invention points to the first century A.D., though alternative estimates range from a remote period of the past to as late as the fourth century A.D. It is appropriate, then, that the word rune means literally “mystery” or “secret.”

No less mystery enveloped these rare carvings in Rudbeck’s day, and his own growing infatuation would bring him into contact with the pioneering scholars in the history of the runes. As with the revival of the Old Norse sagas and eddas, the “runic renaissance” had begun to flourish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars at the forefront of this movement were again Scandinavians, among others the Swedish scholar Johan Bureus and the Danish royal physician Olaus Wormius.

These highly original thinkers traveled the countryside looking for runic inscriptions, meticulously copying them down, and trying to decipher their possible meanings. Significantly, they were also helped by the fact that knowledge of the runes had, in some places, never completely died out. The last surviving “rune masters,” the name for the craftsmen skilled in the art of carving the letters, would live on in certain parts of the Scandinavian peninsula to as late as the early twentieth century. Elsewhere this knowledge had been gradually forgotten or, in some cases, as in Iceland, ruthlessly suppressed for its presumed magical, superstitious qualities.

In Rudbeck’s own study of the runes, the single greatest inspiration was one of these early thinkers, his fellow Swede Johan Bureus, already a valuable source for his theories about the Hyperboreans. With his long white beard and strong mystical leanings, Bureus looked like one of the legendary rune masters whose art he had studied so energetically. Like many mystics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Bureus believed that a harmonious order governed the universe, literally breathed into existence at the beginning of time and encoded in all creation. This divine wisdom had survived the Flood, the confusion at Babel, and the many great upheavals of the past, though at times it had only done so by going underground, flourishing among a select group of thinkers. True prophets and sages had been privy to the secret “hermetic” tradition that, by Rudbeck’s time, was communicated only to the initiated. Bureus spent his entire life trying to penetrate this wisdom, and that was certainly one of the main reasons for his fascination with the runes.

For Bureus saw the enigmatic runic symbols as possibly capturing this original wisdom (one of their many levels and functions in ancient society). They were the oldest language in the world, that is, after Hebrew, though later in his life he would reverse the order, giving precedence to the Scandinavian letters. Bureus’s enthusiasm was certainly infectious. King Charles IX had selected him to teach history to the young prince and future king Gustavus Adolphus, who, when he came to power, welcomed the scholar into his inner circle.